Vice President of Programs and Senior Fellow Todd Moss and Visiting Policy Fellow Kate Almquist Knopf are quoted in an article by The Christian Science Monitor on US foreign policy in Mali.
Since 2002, the US government has plowed at least $700 million in counterterrorism funding into Africa's Sahel, a large swathe of semi-arid territory on the southern edge of the Sahara desert. Mali was a key recipient, taking in approximately $60 million since 2002 from the US.
The money was supposed to boost the capacity of governments to respond to the challenges posed by terrorism and organized crime across the Sahel.
As the US mulls its position on military intervention in Mali and looks to continue shoring up other governments in the Sahel, the debate over how best to use aid in the region has grown sharper.
For Todd Moss at the Center for Global Development (CGD), the performance of the Malian army and the collapse of the Malian state is a “pretty big indictment” of US counterterrorism efforts there. Moss, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of African Affairs at the State Department from 2007 to 2008, wrote on CGD’s “Rethinking US Foreign Assistance Blog,” that the crisis in Mali “suggests that something is very wrong about the U.S. approach to counterterrorism cooperation in the Sahel.”
USAID officials told The Christian Science Monitor that counterterrorism programming in Mali is guided by the “widely recognized assumption” that “soft side inputs such as strengthening community capacity and addressing factors contributing to radicalization” are essential to effective counterterrorism.
These approaches are in fact “largely in sync with the level of scholarship on drivers of violent extremism that exists at this moment,” says Kate Almquist Knopf, who served as assistant administrator for Africa at USAID from 2007 to 2009 and is currently at the Center for Global Development in Washington.
However, Ms. Almquist Knopf, who describes herself as a “skeptic of the use of development programs to counter violent extremism,” also says that the scholarship is only one part of the equation. “Even when we know what the empirical evidence suggests – to whatever extent that it exists thus far – the challenge for managers and policymakers of these programs is translating that, practically speaking, into policies and programs that make sense.”